Crossings
Others’ shores
Ecchymosis no data
Last day
no hope
9,8 km
Frome one essence to another
Muted
The Silent Sky
about
June 5–14, 2025
Ecchymosis no data
2025
Audience Prize
"We were pieces of something, stuck together at random, to see if it would hold."
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Gallimard, Paris, 2019, p.170.
Lê Hoàng Nguyên's work is grounded in a reflection on memory, margins, identity, and migration. The piece presented for the 12th edition of the Prix Dauphine, Ecchymosis no data, explores queer nightlife spaces where, over the course of the night, an unrestrained pursuit of dopamine unfolds: an alchemy of bodies driven by the urgency of escaping an oppressive world.
This tension takes shape through an assemblage of images suspended in glasses filled with an unidentified liquid. Bearing witness to fragments of memory, these photographs are drawn from the artist's personal collections: screenshots of recent transphobic news from the United States, period photographs from the Vietnam War in his possession. Juxtaposed, the work weaves a dialogue between personal narratives and concealed histories. Arranged with clinical precision, these scattered fragments interrogate the power dynamics that run through bodies, exposing the mechanisms used to control and pathologize homosexuality, as well as the normative frameworks that attempt to contain desire. Through encounters, ways of inhabiting space, and the use of substances, Ecchymosis no data reveals a will to redefine, for ourselves, the contours of our own existences.
These experiments are so many sensory explorations, ways of discovering what brings us pleasure while shaping our own intimate laboratory. They also constitute a form of hacking: an access point into our own system, an attempt to reprogram it, to deconstruct both an identity and the norms that frame it. Nocturnal spaces and excess become terrains of transformation, allowing us to rewrite our internal data. The collective dimension is central: these experiences are lived together, in a shared pursuit of pleasure, both bodily and affective. Together, bodies secrete oxytocin, the hormone of love, giving material form to the organic bond woven between them. These spaces of experimentation are not mere escape routes but genuine refuges where forms of care and empowerment are enacted. Self-administration of substances becomes a gesture of resistance, a way of reclaiming possession of one's body and of what runs through it.
At the heart of Lê Hoàng Nguyên's practice, cyclical time breaks with the linearity imposed by Western historical narratives, weaving a link between past and present. Nothing is fixed: every story, even a fragmented one, can be revived and transformed into living, shifting matter. By making anachronism a tool of resistance, Ecchymosis no data reveals the interconnection of diasporas and their memories, a cycle in which destruction and creation coexist. By interrogating colonial, queer, and activist archives, the work restores a voice to erased existences, to the silences that shape History. In exploring these states of vulnerability and resistance, Lê Hoàng Nguyên reveals what it means to inhabit a body marked by shame and oppression, and transforms marginality into a space of emancipation.
Curated by Elisa Leila Durand